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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Read The Power of Babel Instead, 22 Feb 2004
First off, let me say that McWhorter's The Power of Babel was one of the best books on language I have read. It is so dense with information presented in a readable, positive style, that I think I'll read it again.Doing Our Own Thing seems to have been written by McWhorter's crusty twin. He assures us near the beginning that this will not be a John Simon-type screed bemoaning the degradation of language in America. Then he goes on to bemoan the degradation of language in America. He manages to be just as pedantic as any language maven about the fact that "Billy and me went to the store" is NOT an ungrammatical sentence, mentioning the same example at regular intervals throughout the book. Doing Our Own Thing seems like a collection of the author's pet peeves loosely connected to make up a book. McWhorter is concerned about the lack of memorable public speech today and the decline in quality of lyrics, especially in musical theater. He is also annoyed by baggy pants, poetry, and Democrats. In decrying the decline of American speech today, he claims that no public figure can extemporaneously concoct complex sentences and thoughts. Everyone speaks like a regular guy, or worse, like someone a regular guy can feel superior to. But I can recall Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton giving speeches, that while not memorable in a William Jennings Bryan or even John F. Kennedy style, were complex, yet clear. Bill Clinton's speech at the memorial service for the two security guards who were killed at the House of Representatives was eloquent, for instance. McWhorter mentions screenwriter David Mamet as someone who is in touch with real speech and can write dialogue that is both authentic and dramatic. This was a particular surprise to me, since I recently saw Heist on video, a Mamet film, and was distracted from the plot several times by painful dialogue. Not only did all of the characters speak with the same voice, they said things like "cute as a bucketful of kittens" and "as quiet as an ant pissing on cotton." If that is authentic speech, then I must be hanging out with a different crowd than McWhorter. And so it would seem. McWhorter mentions, more than once, that he likes to go to piano bars where you can not only listen to show tunes, but sing along. He notes that there are few straight men at these bars, and for that reason, he finds them an excellent place to meet women. Indeed. It is not surprising that someone who loves language enough to have made it his life's work would be upset at what he perceives to be the decline of his first langauge. But sometimes his complaints have little to do with language at all. He shows us a soap ad from 1929 that has six panels and quite a bit more text than the typical print ad today. Then McWhorter wonders whether ordinary people in 1929 would have used words like "dainty," which appear in the ad (as he uses the word "exquisite" to describe this very ad). Perhaps a better observation is that few ads these days are as wordy because they need to get our attention fast. When was the last time you saw a 60-second commercial on TV? They used to exist, but now advertisers know they only have 15 seconds to get our attention. Is that a language problem, or something else? Doing Our Own Thing is definitely readable and there is enough here to get you thinking (not unlike talk radio), but if you want to read a good book about language, I recommend Power of Babel instead.
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Just Not Worth It, 23 Jan 2009
John McWhorter is obviously an intelligent man, but this book is simply not worth the time. As a foreigner (i.e. natively speaking something else than English) I'm happy to know (as McWhorter points out thirty times in this book) that I treasure my language so much more than do Americans theirs. According to McWhorter the flower power generation is to blame for the neglect of poetry in contemporary America, and, as McWhorter points out repeatedly, he would himself have been a poetry buff had he only been born half a century earlier. He is, in other words, another poor victim of the sixties.
His other main point is that public speaking is nothing like it used to be in the good old days when orators would rant for hours spellbinding their audiences. He freely admits that he wouldn't care to listen to these verbose finely wrought ordeals, - but, once again, in an alternative world that hadn't been degraded by the sixties, he would have been thrilled to find himself subjected to that kind of public speaking.
I'm sure McWhorter could write an excellent book, but in this one he prefers to make himself out to be a pitiable victim of the sixties and tries to string his meandering observations (some humorous, some interesting, all of them pertaining to sit-coms) into something having the trappings of a profound statement on our contemporary cultural malaise. That mr. McWhorter doesn't take his own argument seriously is obvious from the conclusion which is really no conclusion at all, just more random rambling. The author prides himself on writing short books (again, he reminds us, as books used to be in the good old days); if only he'd take the time to really think before putting pen to paper that would make all the difference.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Very readable, stimulating and enlightening., 16 Jul 2008
This is primarily a historical acount of the convergence of public and private speech with numerous examples from the last 150 years or so. This he does with a parallel acount of the changes in educational policy regarding advanced literacy over that period, quoting numerous education directives, old text books, essays and letters.
It is a commonplace for liberals to declare that earlier periods were full of complaints from reactionary conservatives that standards of advanced literacy were declining, implying that things or rather literacy has always been much the same. Here the author shows how they have indeed been continuously declining and that this has been possible because of the very high level they were at in 1865 where he starts. But over this period he argues the steepest decline occurred in and since the 60's.
By 'advanced literacy' I mean the ability to write public or special rhetorical or formal texts of intellectual sophistication and eloquence.
Being a Professor of Linguistics he is far from being pedantic about language since acceptance of linguistic change in the sense of usage has, unfortunately, become an article of faith in that discipline.
The book is given added interest through the author being a black american which makes his comments about music and rap particularly valuable.
Though much of his evidence is naturally taken from the american educational system this does not make it any less relevant to us, first because their system is more important than ours, because America is more important than we are, and secondly because much the same has happened here too.
The biggest flaw in the book is the biggest flaw in the author namely his lack of real appreciation of poetry, and to a slightly lesser extent of opera, which he freely admits. This means that he is also an example of the process he observes although in his case the movement towards the 'vulgar' goes no further than musicals, the so called 'great american song book' and sophisticated jazz and a middle-brow sort of appreciation of poetry. So he certainly isn't on the high ground - though he seems to be aware of this.
The education towards complex formal language (essentially written language as spoken) and it's deployment is ultimately about individual, and social, will or grand intention, and as that progressively fails the education system is modified accordingly. This book explores the social and idealogical changes that have led to these progressive modifications. The 60's brought in a radical levelling relativist agenda more sudden and extreme than anything seen before which made any well crafted rhetoric seem false and untrustworthy and so everything was brought down to the same informal level as everyday casual communication.
The importance of this book is that it charts this process through a particular sort of linguistic change that usually escapes examination and does so with ample evidence showing that even before the Frankfurt School and the 60's liberal left intelligentsia it was well under way. But it was in the 60's that it's final stage rapidly moved to completion so that it is now difficult to imagine it can have further to go except perhaps in the area of taste just to one side of language. This could be the subject of another book by a sociologist of taste which would concern the gradual acceptance of bad taste in cultural products of all kinds.
One of the most interesting things that is explored towards the end of the book is the hermeneutic issue of how our ability to respond to what might be called more 'elevated' thoughts, ideas and emotions, and the appropriate means of expression that convey them, has been reduced; it might seem that we have progressively lost the capacity to tune in to these 'frequencies' as our use of language has undergone the changes described in this book. Safe to say that one mirrors the other but how does the chicken relate to the egg? This question is deeper than hermeneutics goes in it's respectable academic guise, but there are some such as Owen Barfield, Harold Bloom and Richard Poirier who have gone further.
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by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
